Multilateral Online Marketing: The Battle Plan

In today’s extremely tough economy, at that moment in time when someone is
searching for what you have to offer, how fiercely are you competing to be found?
To stay ahead of the competition, you’ve got to pull out all of the stops just to
survive. Are you truly doing everything you possibly can, in order to keep your
business from shrinking? Online marketing options bring horsepower, but you’ve got to avoid the mistake of treating each stage individually. All efforts must be properly coordinated; efficiencies found and then effectively tracking your increased leads and sales is mandatory. Take no prisoners, roll up your sleeves, and utilize our Battle Plan, a multilateral online marketing program designed to decrease your marketing costs and increase your market share.

The Plan

It’s a matter of having the right team, the right attitude, shared strategic interests,
creative marketing materials and the appropriate data. Together we will leverage
the synergies that becomes apparent when you harness the best of web marketing,
including:

• Search engine optimization
• Paid search (pay-per-click)
• Calls to Action
• Phone call tracking (using unique numbers for your website)
• Online PR
• Link-building
• Social media networking
• Reputation monitoring
• Banner advertising
• Online video
• Opt-in Email marketing

A good consultant will coordinate all of the above around common keywords and goals (visitors,conversions to leads/customers and revenue), victory and success will most likely be reaped as a result. Timing is crucial. The stock market may finally be starting to stage a comeback, however, plants and stores are still closing, and thousands of workers are losing their jobs and homes. So how do you stay in the game? How do you fight to win not only the battle, but insure victory in the marketing war and remain profitable in these dar days? At a minimum, don’t make the mistake of drastically cutting all of your marketing budget (hiding in fox holes results in waking up behind enemy lines). Studies have shown that companies that keep marketing during downturns grow four times faster than businesses that simply give up. As Joelle Gropper Kaufman put it in MediaPost, “Savvy marketers realize that it is because many marketers cut advertising spending during a recession that a recession is the best and least expensive time to gain market share through advertising.” The wise battle plan calls for using limited marketing resources more intelligently, and ensuring that they measurably contribute to the health of the business. In order for this to work, you must have a unified Battle Plan with a welltimed emphasis on rolling out the heavy artillery. Whether you’re working in-house or for an agency, it requires a skillful touch and integral planning. The best results are possible only when everyone’s playing the same symphony, and the best ideas get maximum input from every online marketing service you have at your masterful command. Here are several key ways your business can incorporate a Battle Plan:

Put your best forces in motion

Create a bigger sales impact sooner by timely activation of paid search, organic
search and strategic link-building, along with banner ads, online video and e-mail
marketing. Position all of these activities around strategic keywords and corporate
goals for increasing your sales of critical products and services.

Save time and expense

Sharing reports and frequent, fast-paced meetings must be the order of the day.
Don’t get caught up with silos and ineffective plans. Put fresh ideas into action across multiple programs that collectively drive more traffic. In-house teams will avoid extra costs by tapping existing personnel. Agencies generally should be able to charge smaller fees by bundling services.

Survey the battle field and compare intelligence

Observe how new visitors are responding to the site and insure the data gets into the hands of everyone involved – everything from keywords and referral sources to
bounce rates and conversions. Team cooperation is the only way to achieve outstanding results. Be incisive. Good ideas should be repeated. Risky or inferior
plans left behind on the battle field if they don’t support the common purpose.
Don’t let anything sit idle, SEO, for example, will take longer to kick in for high rankings, but a plethora of activity on other fronts can pique the search engines’ interest in a website and attract traffic while at the same time influencing organic ranking results. Provide preliminary optimization while solving a website’s technical issues. Roll out landing pages immediately. You may always revise them based on their performance, and on the insights gleaned from other programs that reflect the same mission. Test, measure and adjust as always, simply do it on a loftier scale than normal.

Share creative content

Ad copy that works well with PPC may very well be a great candidate for the SEO
meta descriptions you’re creating. Or, the description you use on a video-sharing site may have just the right ring to it and work extremely well with an email campaign, SEO, banner ads, link-building or PPC.

Adjust your strategy

You may have targeted keywords for a PPC effort, but SEO specialists may also
identify search terms that could perform well with existing PPC campaigns and new
landing pages. Similarly, conversion data may suggest that a keyword or phrase is
worth pursuing with further on-site SEO efforts and/or anchor text in link-building
initiatives. Or, your on-site video lead form may work well on a page that your
banner campaigns target.

Use Email Marketing as an Anchor

Maintain a close eye on your traffic, regardless of where it came from and just how it got there. With an elegant, cross-platform process, you’ll be able to formalize a
schedule to dependably stay in touch with your prospective clients as well as your
sought-after customers. A timely, email campaign is often overlooked.

Create and re-use your Calls to Action

You’ll save money and target the best conversion possibilities by carefully placing
Calls to Action like “Set an Appointment” and “Download Our white paper.” With a
coordinated attack plan, you will easily be able adapt each for use in other areas.
Your email campaign may become an ideal PPC landing page. Or you may find it
could be modified for SEO. Always use distinguishable phone numbers in your
campaigns, and support your efforts across the board with accurate call tracking.

Nurture your teams

Before you ask for cooperation, make sure potential team members get along by
promoting events, meetings, workshops, etc. that will result in emphasizing
teamwork.

Nail down processes

Yes, it can be mind-numbing, but in the long run, you’ll be better off if everyone
follows the same system. Repetition breeds familiarity and results in the ability of a
member of one team to be quickly brought up to speed when asked to join another
effort within the organization.

Attain superiority

It is sometimes not the easiest thing to define quality, but you must always provide outstanding service in each area. Our Battle Plan would suffer a great deal if one service dropped the ball. Imagine ground troops without air support. Get the idea? A central project manager is essential. An effective project manager will bring all of the players together and make sure they’re all working in synchronization. He or she ought to be able to spot the first signs of trouble, and speak to the situation before it can do damage.

Follow through is tantamount to success

You will need to find ways to stay in touch with potential clients. With an all-out
attack, you’re going to generate large quantities of leads and sales. What to do next? We’ve seen great results from opt-in e-mail marketing campaigns. Develop clear and concise e-mail messages and send them out regularly on a scheduled basis such as 10, 30 or 60 days after you generate the initial lead. We’ve figured out how to deploy a Battle Plan to get the most out of each marketing specialty for the least cost. What measures are you following to make sure your company will survive?

Multilateral Online Marketing: The Battle Plan

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